The Witches: Salem, 1692 (28 page)

No other witchcraft suspect could rival Bridget Bishop for supernatural activity or bedroom disturbances. One other could account for yellow birds, cats, stalking wolves. Five confessed witches—including her own daughter—had named her. Her husband noted the strange mark on her shoulder. She had suckled a familiar on her finger. Her name turned up in the devil’s book. She had ridden on a pole to the parsonage meadow for Burroughs’s “hellish meeting.” On a fresh sheet of paper, Thomas Newton outlined his case against Sarah Good, the Salem beggar, noting with satisfaction that the testimony of the bewitched and the confessors regarding the witches’ Sabbath conformed. Newton relied on a detailed abstract he had made of Tituba’s account, tidy in its cause and effect: Good visited the parsonage. She mumbled under her breath. The children fell ill. Moreover, only their victims and their confederates could see the witches. Good had seen Osborne, whose powers did not level her. Good, reasoned the attorney general, “must consequently be a witch.” The pieces fit together seamlessly.

The call for jurors had hardly gone out when Sarah Good began
afflicting again. On June 28 Susannah Shelden contorted before the grand jury to whom she submitted testimony that, as recently as two days earlier, Good had pricked, pinched, and nearly choked her to death. Good had lashed her hands together so tightly that two men had had to rescue her; they understood it was the fourth time in two weeks the eighteen-year-old had found her wrists bound. It was on one such occasion that the broom had wound up in the apple tree; between fits, Shelden told of invisible hands that had stolen a saucer from the table. She had watched Good carry it outside. The Procters’ maid also writhed before the grand jurors; Shelden explained that Good assaulted her. Under oath Sarah Bibber swore that Good had bewitched her four-year-old. Parris swore to the sufferings of the girls during the March preliminary hearing. The grand jury handed down at least three indictments against Good, whose trial began immediately. Although she was about Bibber’s age, she looked decrepit. For weeks already her clothes had been in shreds. If earlier she had mumbled like a witch, she had come to resemble one. She had been in jail since February with a nursing child, and, for some length of time, with the dying Osborne.

Good tended to seize opportunities to speak her mind, a reason she stood before a panel of black-gowned justices in the first place. It is more likely that she entered a screed into the record than a hopeless, halfhearted denial. A guilty plea at this juncture would in any event have accomplished little. Between the girls’ flailing and the mountain of evidence, her arraignment and trial extended over two days. At its end, the jury delivered a guilty verdict. It little surprised one Boston observer, who commented on the formulaic, one-size-fits-all approach in Salem. As he saw it, “The same evidence that served for one would serve for all the rest.”

Neither John Hale nor Deodat Lawson, both present, wrote about Sarah Good. Nor did Cotton Mather. A burden to her community, a menace and a malcontent, she was not noteworthy. The case against her was largely spectral. The two accused witches who followed—over the course of the week the grand jury heard eight cases and the trial jury
five—interested Mather more. No confederate had implicated Susannah Martin, the tart-tongued, seventy-one-year-old Amesbury woman who had scoffed at the idea that the girls were bewitched, suggesting that they practiced black magic themselves. Martin had stood accused once already for witchcraft, however. Evidence suggested that in the course of Bishop’s trial, she had nursed an imp. As in that case, Newton could appeal not only to the bewitched girls but to a procession of afflicted men as well. Constables located a dozen in all. They had no need to resort to fits to express themselves, testifying straightforwardly, persuasively, and without interruption.

Martin too pestered men in their beds. She bit fingers and transformed herself into a black hog. She specialized in animals; the justices heard of drowned oxen, crazed cows, blighted cattle, flying puppies, dogs transformed into kegs, killer cats. Martin made sense of other oddities as well, having had several decades to do so. Over two years, a Salisbury man had been carried about by demons. For six months of that time, they rendered him mute. He now swore that at their hellish meetings, meetings at which he was offered a book to sign in exchange for “all the delectable things, persons, and places that he could imagine,” he had seen Martin. A fifty-three-year-old who many years earlier could not find his way home one Saturday night—although he was but three miles away and walking in bright moonlight—attributed his disorientation to Martin. Just beyond her field he stumbled into a ditch that he knew full well was not there.

Susannah Martin had quibbled over church seating. She drove a hard bargain. She exchanged cross words with her brother-in-law. She scorned those who had testified against her in 1669, as many colorfully recalled. When a Salisbury carpenter allowed in the course of that trial that he believed her to be a witch, Martin had promised “that some she-devil would shortly fetch him away.” The killer cat had pounced the next night, lunging at his throat as he lay in bed. After a Salisbury woman had appeared before the earlier grand jury, Martin startled her while she was out milking the cow. “For thy defaming me at court,” she swore, “I’ll
make thee the miserablest creature in the world.” Two months later, out of the blue, the woman began to spew nonsense. Physicians declared her bewitched, as she remained for two decades.
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It is difficult to say which came first: Was Martin, like Bridget Bishop, strident because she had stood trial previously, or had she stood trial previously because she was strident? Witchcraft inscribed a vicious circle, its allegation generating witchlike behavior. There appeared no other response to an accusation than a malediction, which explained at least some of Martin’s unminced words. Singled out earlier, she attracted charges; 1692 was a good time to revive old ones. Once questions arise we sift for answers. And when it comes to blame, none of us draws a blank; only after Bridget Bishop told the miller’s son of the rumors swirling around her did odd things begin to happen to him. We have no record of what Martin said—to her accusers or the magistrates—on June 29, though she remained defiant throughout the proceedings. “Her chief plea,” Cotton Mather noted, based on pages lost to us, “was that she had led a most virtuous and holy life.” That struck him as blasphemous. The jurors agreed, returning a guilty verdict. Months later, the court documents in hand, Mather offered the last word on Susannah Martin, whom he had not met and no longer could: “This woman was one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world.”

Two other cases that week turned on natural grudges and preternatural pranks. The evidence against Topsfield’s Elizabeth How featured a full collection of fairy-tale marvels: leaping pigs, poisoned turnips, self-emptying vessels, dissolving fence posts, amnesia-inducing apples. Her case differed from Martin’s in two crucial respects. The ox sacrificed to the turnip belonged to one brother-in-law, the leaping sow to another. When named in May, Elizabeth How had applied to the first brother-in-law for assistance. Might he accompany her to Salem? Her blind husband could not make the trip; she had no desire to go alone. She
too discovered how difficult it was to outrun the cloud of suspicion that, once raised, wafted about the neighborhood. For any other reason he would readily accompany her, the in-law replied. Here he drew the line. He bargained with her: “If you are a witch, tell me how long you have been a witch and what mischief you have done and then I will go with you.” The next day his sow leaped three to four feet in the early-evening air, “turning about, squeaking, falling, and dying.”

In his account of her trial Cotton Mather did not note a significant advantage fifty-five-year-old Elizabeth How had over the previous suspects: No fewer than twelve people testified in her defense, two ministers among them. She had never been anything other than a good Christian, faithful in her promises, just in her dealings, pious in her beliefs. Her husband’s family did not abandon her entirely; her ninety-four-year-old father-in-law described her devotion to his blind son, whom she gently led about by the hand. She tended their farm. She cared for their six children. An Ipswich shoemaker testified that How spoke no ill of her accusers, who she thought harmed themselves more than they did her. All kinds of alarm bells sounded in the How testimony. The Rowley assistant minister took it upon himself to join How on a visit to a ten-year-old girl whom she had allegedly bewitched. The child said nothing of her, in her convulsions or afterward. She managed even to take How’s hand in the minister’s presence. Had she hurt her? “No, never,” replied the child. The minister later sat outdoors with the girl. From an upstairs window her brother called down: “Say Goodwife How is a witch, say she is a witch!”

The Salem jurors heard of enchanted hay and bewitched rope when Sarah Wilds came before them the same day. Her case prominently featured malicious relatives. She had been an easy target, arriving too promptly in a family that still mourned Wilds’s previous wife. Though confined to the home, women were the geographically mobile ones in New England; they were the strangers who came to town. The Topsfield constable had weeks earlier rounded up and delivered the Hobbses to Salem; he was Wilds’s son. “I have had serious thoughts many times
since,” twenty-eight-year-old Ephraim Wilds told the court, “whether my seizing of them might not be some cause of her thus accusing my mother.” Retaliation seemed likely; in arresting Hobbs, he “almost saw revenge in her face, she looked so maliciously on me.” At a time when it still seemed possible to walk out of court with a reprieve, How and Wilds no doubt insisted on their innocence. Generally the courtroom rejoinders seem to have fallen somewhere between Joan of Arc’s straight-spined “People have been hung for telling the truth before now,” and Dorothy’s wide-eyed, back-in-Kansas “Doesn’t anybody believe me?” No demonic Sabbaths or diabolical pacts figured among the charges against either woman. Both had defenders. Wilds was a full church member. Flying pigs, bewitched hay, and misbehaving scythes made indelible impressions, however. The jury found both women guilty of witchcraft.

Mather elected not to write of another case tried that Wednesday or of a suspect to whom the adjectives “impudent, scurrilous, and wicked” had never been applied. No one had accused Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft before 1692. She had never so much as appeared in court. Nor since the arrival of the marshal on her doorstep, weeks earlier, had anyone launched as concerted a defense as the large and influential Nurse clan. Theirs was a family in which brothers-in-law rode to the rescue rather than prodding the accused to confess to witchcraft. Francis Nurse had energetically canvassed the village, riding door to door with a petition asserting that his wife was, as she had claimed in March—five girls and two grown women flailing about her—as innocent “as the child unborn.” Thirty-nine villagers signed Nurse’s petition, although it did nothing to free his wife from jail or exempt her from two brutal physical examinations. Samuel Sibley, husband of the witch-cake baker, signed, as did seven Putnams (including one of Nurse’s original accusers), the father of an afflicted eleven-year-old, and three of the four church members who had called on Nurse to tell her of her plight, a group that included Justice Hathorne’s sister. (Parris remained staunchly on the other side,
his niece among the four signatories to the indictments.) No case so sharply divided the community.
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Francis Nurse launched a more targeted offensive as well. On June 29 the jury heard evidence not only against his wife but also her accusers. A villager swore that Dr. Griggs’s maid had lied about having attended meeting the previous month. Having sat at Rebecca’s bedside over the previous weeks, a neighbor pointed out several inconsistencies in Susannah Shelden’s story. The witches had hauled Susannah through the grass and over stone walls on her belly, like a snake. No; she had surmounted the wall herself. She had flown on a pole to Boston. No; the devil had carried her through the air. A Beverly couple who had employed the Putnams’ maid several years earlier observed that the nineteen-year-old enjoyed an arm’s-length relationship with the truth. Francis Nurse had no trouble discrediting spiteful Sarah Bibber; for all the love of her neighbors, she sounds like someone who, had she not joined the girls, would have been accused of witchcraft herself. She had a testy relationship with her husband. She wished her child ill. She spoke obscenely; she had long taken to falling into fits when crossed. Three different villagers denounced her as an “unruly, turbulent spirit.” The resolute Nurses corroborated what witchcraft allegations tended to prove: No one was misdemeanor-free.

The case against Rebecca Nurse was thin on the occult; her husband did his best to tug the supernatural rug wholly out from under it. The parents of an alleged victim testified that their child’s death was due purely to “a malignant fever.” They entertained no witchcraft suspicions. Nathaniel Putnam, who had waged an interminable battle against the Nurses over their neighboring lands, testified in Rebecca’s defense, although his nephew had pressed the initial charges. Putnam had known the pious great-grandmother for years. She had raised and educated a
good and godly family. While she had differed with neighbors, he had never heard a whisper regarding sorcery. The defendant did what she could to return common sense to the scene. Before the court reconvened, she submitted a request. She had endured two invasive physical examinations. The experienced woman on that panel—“the most ancient, skillful prudent person of them all”—had disagreed with the rest. Might the authorities dispatch a professional? Nurse suggested a few names. Two of her daughters confirmed that their mother had been troubled for years by complications from childbirth, though “the jury of women seem to be afraid it should be something else.”

In the jittery courtroom the girls impressed their infirmities on the jury. Already pins punctured their lips, in one case binding them together; Ann Putnam plucked another from her hand at the How hearing. During Rebecca Nurse’s trial, Sarah Bibber clasped her hands to her knees and howled in pain: the witch had pricked her! Unfortunately Nurse’s daughter had kept an eye on Bibber; she saw her pull pins from her clothing and jab herself. At one point court officers escorted Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs into the room. Nurse knew the Topsfield mother and daughter from prison. What were they doing there? she asked, startled. The question would return to haunt her. And it did nothing to derail the account of the occult Sabbath at which Nurse had officiated, seated, asserted Parris’s niece, in the place of honor, at the devil’s side.